Laurel Theatre
1500 Laurel Street,
San Carlos,
CA
94070
1500 Laurel Street,
San Carlos,
CA
94070
3 people
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Showing 26 - 32 of 32 comments
I worked at The Laurel after the short porno run. It was a beautiful theatre and a shame to have lost it. The marquee out on El Camino Real was still in use up until the end. At one point it said, “For a good time call…” I was one of the workers who crawled up there and changed the letters and also the one who sawed off the “Tivoli Theatre” portion of the marquee! When I finally quit working there, shortly before it closed for good, the current owner wrote everyone bad payroll checks. I never was able to cash my last two! A sad ending.
The Laurel was not a single floor theatre, it had stadium style seating, with one of the original opera style theatre curtains on the peninsula (besides the Palm). It was a beautiful theatre, and did show porn. I worked there briefly and the owners at the time started to refuse to pay us workers, so while the picketers were outside the theatre protesting the porn, we were letting everyone in for free that was over 18! The Laurel even had a wooden marquee on the El Camino Real to display what was playing. That practice was abandoned in the late 70’s when it went Porn. Pretty Peaches and Amanda By Night didn’t look good on the El Camino. The lease was too expensive and porno left the Laurel, but continued to show double bills until its closure. It was closed for a long time. Sad to see it go, I understand that it was turned into what is called the “Laurel Condos” and the marquee that was supposed to be saved, is gone.
I worked at this cinema for years in the 1980’s. This place was home to me. I was at one time both the manager and projectionist. This theatre had a very eery feel late at night when nobody else was there except me. I often joked that it had a ghost.
This did operate as a porn theater in 1979-1980. One of the features playing there was “Sweet Savage”, which had Aldo Ray in it. (Ray did not do any sex scenes in the film.)
I believe that the theater that was picketed was not the Laurel, but the smaller one north on Laurel where Le Boulanger now is…that was once a small art house, that for a while was showing porn.
The one and only time I went to the Laurel Theatre (I didn’t live in the area) was in 1979 when I took my date there to see Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now”. I recall it with fondness because it was a large and beautiful theater, very comfortable and spacious, due to size and its Art Moderne theme.
The architect was Frederick Quandt. It was a stadium style auditorium. When the office and condominium complex to replace the theatre was originally designed, the huge three-sided sign tower was intended to be saved and placed on the new building. Indeed, the finished development features a blank niche, where the sign was to have been placed. This never happened.